Veterans are planning a 'deployment' to Standing Rock to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline

Police
confront protesters with a rubber bullet gun during a protest
against plans to pass the Dakota Access pipeline near the
Standing Rock Indian Reservation, near Cannon Ball, North Dakota,
U.S. November 20, 2016.Stephanie
Keith/REUTERS

“Most civilians who’ve never served in a uniform are gutless
worms who’ve never been in a fight in their life,” Wes Clark Jr.
declares. “So if we don’t stop it, who will?”

Clark Jr. is one of the most vociferous opponents of the Dakota
Access Pipeline, a controversial 1,170-mile project that, if and
when it is completed, will shuttle an estimated 470,000 barrels
of crude oil every day from North Dakota to Illinois. “It’s
immoral, and wrong, and dangerous to us all,” Clark Jr. adds.

He doesn’t fit the traditional tree-hugger mold. He’s not a
hippie. Nor is he a member of the Lakota or Dakota tribes, the
two Native American group known collectively as the Sioux. He’s a
former Army officer and the organizer of an upcoming three-day
deployment of U.S. military veterans to the Standing Rock Sioux
Reservation in southern North Dakota, the site of an escalating
months-long standoff between law enforcement-backed security
contractors and activists that has so far resulted in multiple
injuries, more than 500 arrests, and a United Nations
investigation of potential human rights abuses.

According to an “operations order” for the planned engagement,
posted to social media in mid-November, “First Americans have
served in the Unites States Military, defending the soil of our
homelands, at a greater percentage than any other group of
Americans. There is no other people more deserving of veteran
support.”

Clark Jr. is a 47-year-old writer, political commentator, and
activist based in California. Joining him in the fight is Michael
A. Wood Jr., a Marine Corps veteran and former Baltimore police
officer who retired his badge in 2014 to become an advocate for
national police reform. Earlier this month, the duo formed
Veterans Stand For Standing
Rock with the hope of drawing scores of veterans, as well as
fire fighters, ex-law enforcement officers, emergency medical
personnel and others to the battleground for a three-day
“deployment” in early December to “prevent progress on the Dakota
Access Pipeline and draw national attention to the human rights
warriors of the Sioux tribes.” Both men say they’re prepared to
take a bullet, rubber or otherwise, for a cause they believe
should be of critical importance to any patriotic American.

“This country is repressing our people,” Wood Jr. says. “If we’re
going to be heroes, if we’re really going to be those veterans
that this country praises, well, then we need to do the things
that we actually said we’re going to do when we took the oath to
defend the Constitution from enemies foreign and domestic.”

Protesters
against the construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline block
a highway in near Cannon Ball, N.D., on Wednesday, Oct. 26,
2016.Associated Press/James
MacPherson

The Standing Rock Sioux Reservation was originally established as
part of the Great Sioux Reservation under Article 2 of the Treaty
of Fort Laramie of April 29, 1868. In 1877, the U.S. government
initiated the still ongoing process of chipping away and dividing
the land it had granted to the people of the Lakota and Dakota
nations, with significant reductions taking place in 1889 and
then again during the 1950s and 1960s, when the Army Corps of
Engineers built five large dams along the Missouri River,
uprooting villages and sinking 200,000 acres of land below water.

When the Corps of Engineers returned to Standing Rock in 2015, it
was to assess whether or not it should approve a path for the
Dakota Access Pipeline across the Missouri River, a project that
would involve construction on some of the land that had been
stripped from the Sioux, who still regard it as sacred —
although, that fact seems to have been ignored, maybe
even intentionally, in the assessment.

Because the Corps neglected to consult the Standing Rock Sioux,
as it was required to do under the National Historic Preservation Act (Section 106),
the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Department of
Interior, and the American Council on Historic Preservation all
criticized the assessment, but the project was eventually
approved. The decision was a major victory for Energy Transfer
Partners, the Texas-based parent company of Dakota Access LLC,
which estimates the pipeline will bring $156 million in sales and
income taxes to state and local governments and create thousands
of temporary jobs.

The
burned hulks of heavy trucks sit on Highway 1806 near Cannon
Ball, N.D., on Friday, Oct. 28, near the spot where protesters of
the Dakota Access pipeline were evicted from private property a
day earlier.Associated Press/James
MacPherson

But as the protests have intensified, and more outsiders,
including members of more than 200 Native American tribes from
across the North America, have become involved, Standing Rock
has, for some, come to represent something much bigger than a
struggle between a disenfranchised people and a
government-backed, billion-dollar corporation. It’s a battle to
save humanity from itself.

“Mother Earth’s axis is off and it’s never going back,” says
Phyllis Young, a Sioux tribal elder. “And we have to help keep it
in balance for as long as we can. I am a mother and a
grandmother. Those are my credentials to ensure a future with
clean drinking water — a future of human dignity, human rights,
and human survival.”

Young grew up on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. She has
been present at many of the protests and says she’s seen people
brutalized at the hands of the security contractors and law
enforcement officials guarding the land where the drilling is set
to take place. It was Young who got Clark Jr involved. In late
summer, she was in Washington, D.C., lobbying for the military to
promote an alternative (and scientifically dubious) clean energy
source called low-energy nuclear reaction, when she heard of a
military veteran who was a forceful advocate for environmental
conservation. Clark Jr. was eager to help.

He spent weeks trying to assemble a legal team for the Standing
Rock Sioux, and even contacted Independent Diplomat, a nonprofit organization
that helps governments navigate complex diplomatic processes. “I
pulled all of the levers, and none of them worked,” Clark Jr.
recalls. Then, in early November, the plan dawned on him: He’d
bring his fellow veterans. Lots of them. And they’d come prepared
to put their lives on the line.

“We’re not going out there to get in a fight with anyone,” Clark
Jr. says. “They can feel free to beat us up, but we’re 100%
nonviolence.”

You may have heard of Clark Jr.’s father. Wesley Clark Sr.
retired from the Army in 2000 as a four-star general. His career
began in the jungles of Vietnam, where he was shot four
timesduring an enemy ambush near Saigon, and culminated in a
posting as Supreme Allied Commander Europe during the Kosovo War.
In 2004, he ran for the Democratic Party presidential nomination
on platform that criticized the Iraq War and called for measures
to combat climate change. Clark Jr., who was born in Florida
while Clark Sr. was in Vietnam and grew up on military bases
throughout the United States and Europe, seems to have inherited
both his father’s commanding spirit and his progressive ideals.

Police
use a water cannon on a protester during a protest against plans
to pass the Dakota Access pipeline near the Standing Rock Indian
Reservation, near Cannon Ball, North Dakota, U.S. November 20,
2016.Stephanie
Keith/REUTERS

Clark Jr. had just graduated from Georgetown’s School of Foreign
Service when he joined the Army as a cavalry officer. He served
on active duty from 1992–1996 — “nothing dangerous,” he
says. On Sept. 11, 2001, he was living in New York City, and
after seeing the towers fall, he decided to re-enlist. “I was
like, ‘I’m going back in. I’m going to go in there and fuck
people up,’” he recalls.

It was Clark Sr., the decorated war hero, who convinced him not
to. As Clark Jr. recalls, his father foresaw U.S. military
intervention in Iraq and warned that as a soldier he would be
fighting a war that had nothing to do with defeating al Qaeda.
“He was right, but I’ll tell you, I’ve never felt worse about a
decision in my life,” Clark Jr. says.

Clark Jr. may never have served in combat, but when he talks
about Standing Rock, he sounds like a battle-hardened general.
This isn’t his first foray into boots-on-the-ground environmental
activism. He’s currently working with an organization called
Climate Mobilization, which is focused on “building and
supporting a social movement that causes the US federal
government to commence WWII-scale climate mobilization.”

But he’s perhaps best known as a co-host of the political web
series The Young Turks. On the The Young Turks website, Clark Jr.
is described as an Army
veteran “currently trying to save human civilization from climate
change.” The impending confrontation at Standing Rock, he says,
will be “the most important event up to this time in human
history.”

Vets Standing For Standing Rock was announced via an official
sounding letter formatted like a five-paragraph military
operation order, breaking down the “opposing forces” — “Morton
County Sheriff’s office combined with multiple state police
agencies and private security contractors” — “Mission,”
“Execution” and “Logistics,” among other things. A packing list
virtually mirrors the ones issued to soldiers preparing to deploy
to the field (minus the weapons). But there are also parts of the
document that read like a revolutionary manifesto.

A
man from the Muskogee tribe looks at the Oceti Sakowin shrouded
in mist during a protest against the Dakota Access pipeline near
the Standing Rock Indian Reservation near Cannon Ball, North
Dakota, U.S. November 11, 2016.REUTERS/Stephanie Keith

Under the section titled “Friendly Forces,” for example, the op
order states, “we are there to put our bodies on the line, no
matter the physical cost, in complete nonviolence to provide a
clear representation to all Americans of where evil resides.”The
document was accompanied by a link to a GoFundMe campaign that has
raised nearly $20,000 of its $100,000 goal since it was created
on Nov. 11. The money, Clark Jr. says, will only be used for
helping volunteers with transportation costs and then bailing
those who are arrested out of jail.

Wood Jr. says the op-order was Clark Jr.’s idea, but the two men
agree that organizing like a military unit is the smartest
approach, especially because most of the people expected to join
them on the ground have served.

“It’s simple and we have clearly defined goals, so people don’t
get caught up in the confusion,” says Wood Jr., who served with
the Baltimore Police Department for more than a decade. “One of
the issues the police are going to face is that our level of
planning and coordination is vastly superior to theirs, so they
may end up with a problem when it comes to that.”

Here then is the plan: On Dec. 4, Clark Jr. and Wood Jr., along
with a group of veterans and other folks in the “bravery
business,” as Wood Jr. puts it — 500 total is the goal, but
they’re hoping for more — will muster at Standing Rock. The
following morning they will join members of the Standing Rock
Sioux tribe, including Young, for a traditional healing ceremony.
With an eye toward the media, old military uniforms will be
donned so that if the veterans are brutalized by the police, they
are brutalized not as ordinary citizens, but as people who once
served the government they are protesting against.

Then body armor, ear plugs, and gas masks will be issued to those
who didn’t bring their own. Bagpipes will play, and traditional
Sioux war songs will be sung. The music will continue as everyone
marches together to the banks of the Missouri, on the other side
of which a line of guards in riot gear will be standing ready
with rifles, mace, batons, and dogs. Then, the veterans and their
allies — or at least the ones who are brave enough — will lock
arms and cross the river in a “massive line” for their “first
encounter” with the “opposing forces.”

Dakota Access pipeline
protestersStephanie
Keith/Reuters

The goal is to make it to the drilling pad and surround it, arm
in arm. That will require making it through the line of guards,
who have repelled other such attempts with a level of physical
force Sioux tribal members and protesters have described as
“excessive” — claims that recently prompted a United Nations
investigation. Of course, that’s what the body armor and gas
masks are for.

“We’ll have those people who will recognize that they’re not
willing to take a bullet, and those who recognize that they are,”
says Wood Jr. “It’s okay if some of them step back, but Wes and I
have no intention of doing so.”

Of course, as most veterans know full well, even the best plans
go out the window the moment the shit hits the fan. It seems
probable that the group will be met by fierce resistance from
those charged with keeping people out of the construction site.
Despite a recent decision by the Corps of
Engineers to delay further work on the pipeline, Energy
Transfer Partners is still hoping to complete the project by
January.

The segment that will cross beneath the Missouri at Standing Rock
is the last major piece of the puzzle. Strengthening the resolve
of the company’s executives is the fact that Energy Transfer
Partners CEO Kelcy Warren donated more than $100,000 to elect
Donald Trump, and Trump himself owns stock in the company. “I’m
100% sure that the pipeline will be approved by a Trump
administration,” Warren told NBC News on Nov. 12.

Nonetheless, Clark Jr. and Wood Jr. remain undeterred. If
anything, the likelihood of approval only makes them more
determined. After all, this is war.

“The Joint Chiefs of Staff labeled the climate emergency as the
number one security threat to the country, and they’ve been
labeling it that for years,” Clark Jr. says. “All you need to do
is put an overlay on any map in the world where there’s a water
and crisis and you’re going to see massive political violence in
that location. And unless we act, we’re going to be dealing with
that exact same situation right here in the United States.”